Saturday, 20 February 2016

Listening to Courtney Barnett on repeat all morning. I finished the drawing I had to stop yesterday because I got a headache which may have been a migraine. 'Light sensitivity' is a pretty vague term when you think about it. But just thinking about exercise can make you feel better.

I think I finally cracked the fiction part of my thesis yesterday. I still don't know how it's going to end but my character has become what I want and not what people think (it all makes sense, it all makes sense). Reading endless books and watching endless films by men, about men, makes it hard to write the truth. It makes you forget how to be a woman.

I make overly complicated lists but they keep me on track. I remind myself to vary my sentence length. I forget how strong the marker fumes can be and consider experimenting with oils. I still have a headache but 'taking it easy' doesn't qualify when mostly I do nothing at all. I push on, I push through.

I just read this essay by Tavi Gevinson: http://ilymag.com/2016/02/09/tavi-gevinson-essay/ I want to spend so much time just reading beautiful essays and long form journalism and well-written celebrity profiles. They don't understand that it's not the subject, it's just good writing. We had Honeymoon in Vegas on video tape. We watched it a lot.

Tuesday, 16 February 2016

I've read the novel Eucalyptus more times than it strictly warrants, I think. It's weird given how resistant I was to anything Australian at the sort of age that I was reading it. I'm still resistant to any writing set in the bush or whatever on earth 'the outback' is but I can now appreciate a lot more of my home setting than I once could. That's probably another essay, though.

For $12 I bought a bunch of Australian native flowers today. From that $12 I now have five vases with flowers or foliage in them, scattered all over the house (plus another vase with pale pink carnations that were my boyfriend's pick). Most of my vases are from op shops, bar the one above - Venetian glass, a gift from a friend - and my Mozi jug.

Having a couple of vases around is important, even if they're just in the back of the cupboard. Floors don't look as dirty when there's a bunch of flowers on the table. Mixed bunches can be broken up into a bunch of separate posies that not only probably look nicer than the tacky supermarket bouquets but also mean you get more flowers around the place for the same price. This is my important lifehack. It's probably very obvious but I'm chuffed with myself for how far I stretched one bunch of flowers today.

Eucalypts smell so wonderful and will keep smelling nice even after they don't look great, unlike other flowers. The series I'm doing my thesis on* has this description of this horrible goat monster that lives in waterways and smells like flowers that have been left rotting in a vase for too long. Having just thrown out some old flowers a couple of days before rereading that line, I had a very vivid idea of what that smelled like. In a way that was nice because it's a high fantasy series so it's not exactly *super relatable* so having a very fresh and present concept of what that smell would be really helped engage me in the scene. But on the downside, gross.

My hands smelled like eucalyptus for hours after cutting and rearranging the bouquet. The below is the one I'm most happy with/proud of. The crumpled bag vase is one of my best Savers finds. I love spinning gum for it's soft grey colour and unique shape (this is Mum's influence, hi Mum), and I haven't seen the dark red puff ball flower before but it's fantastic. This is the third, possible even fourth social media platform I've gushed about it on today so hopefully someone will tell me what it is. Every now and then I think about how nice it would be to be a florist but then I remember they have to get up ludicrously early in the morning.

A florist and a homewares store that were on Sydney Rd have just recently relocated into the same space, right near my bus stop. It's really expensive but everything they have is beautiful and it will be a lovely place to duck into on the wait for the bus.

Tuesday, 9 February 2016

I'm writing from my parents' office in rural NSW. I've been to the beach twice and have sunburn on my left shoulder. After I left the water, we spotted a stringray right where I had been. It's the year of the monkey, which means this should be my year.

I think about cosmic payoffs and universal balance and whatever else it is that gets called karma that actually isn't. 'One good turn deserves another'. What's reward from working really hard and what's reward from the universe after a string of bad luck? The closest I get to superstition is telling myself, after a really hard time, that something really good must be coming my way. This yeat though I mean to put the work in instead of just feeling crap and waiting for something good to land in front of me.

Looking at old artworks has reminded me that I need to work harder on my technical ability. I feel like I've gone backwards in some respects. I need to focus on my realist drawing as much as my comics and lineart, and different mediums besides.